5 Tips to Getting More Out of Your FinTech Paid Media Budget

FINTECH IN OUR EVERYDAY 

Financial Technology, otherwise known as FinTech, has developed into a daily ‘necessity’ for the mass population, with 64% of the world population stating they use Fintech in their everyday lives. With apps for everything covering Digital Banking, Apple Pay, Budgeting, Mortgage Management, Crypto, Online Payments and more, consumers are routinely leveraging Fintech without even knowing it. 

So, what does this mean for Fintech brands like yourself?

With disruptive, challenger brands constantly entering and changing the market - it’s critical that all Fintech companies make strides to keep up and stand out if they want to capture and maintain demand. 

WHY IS PAID IMPORTANT IN FINTECH?

When it comes to Paid Media, emerging technologies need a strong and effective online presence and PPC strategy if they want to stand out. The Fintech space brings high levels of competition with dominating brand giants (with long-established brand equity) and disruptive start-ups. 

Paid Media is a great tool to help build brand awareness and product demand, while defending your brand from competitors. One of these key features within a Fintech PPC strategy is remarketing campaigns, designed to pull users back to your site all while showcasing your USPs, they are an essential driver of conversions at lower stages of the marketing funnel. 

5 TIPS TO GET THE MORE FROM YOUR PAID MEDIA BUDGETS

#1 Understanding Your Audience

Developing a thorough understanding of your audience and their motivations/pain points will give you the insights required to craft tailored copy, audience targeting, ad placements, channel selection and much more. 

Understanding these drivers and the behavioural science that can be used to target their motivations is where we thrive at Reflect Digital. We’ve even developed our own unique framework, Monkey, Lion, Dog, which we use as a tool for layering our paid media messaging with behavioural language geared to increase relativity and increase paid performance in CTR, CVR, ROAS and conversions. 

To prove the importance of true customer understanding in FinTech, we took this approach with a finance client, Opayo. Once we’d completed our discovery phase, we identified several optimisation paths we could take, one of which involved overhauling the language and creatives used for programmatic advertising. By optimising the messaging based on audience motivations, we were able to deliver a 283% YoY increase in leads, an 87% reduction in CPA and a 49% increase in conversion rate within just four months. 

#2 Quality Score

Quality score is a measure used in Googles Ads to determine the ‘quality’ of your campaign. It comprises three primary components: expected click-through rate, ad relevancy and landing page experience. 

Quality score is a tool used by Google to determine your ad relevance compared to other competitors' ads running in your industry. Each component gets a rank out of 10, so you may be performing well in ad relevancy but lacking in landing page experience. 

A good quality score helps increase your ad’s position in SERPs (search engine results pages) while lowering your CPC (cost per click). This means if your quality score is higher than one of your competitor's competing ads, Google will deem your ad more relevant to the audience and rank it above your competition for the same bid. 

Therefore, investing time in crafting campaigns to deliver what the user wants: relevant ads with clear messaging and a strong, related landing page experience can help lower your campaign spend and increase your ad performance. 

If you’re looking for tips on how to improve your FinTech campaign’s quality score, please take a read of this blog: 3 Powerful Tips to Improve Quality Score. 

#3 A/B Testing

A/B testing, or split testing, is another powerful way to get more from your paid media budget. The practice allows you to run two (or more) variations of the same ad simultaneously to determine which performs the best. 

The data collected enables you to determine which ad performed best and why. These insights can then be rolled out to other campaigns to allow for further optimisation. When carrying out A/B testing, it's important to only focus on testing one variable at a time. By only changing one variable, you can identify which element of your ad is causing a change in the results. Variants you might test include: 

• Headlines
• Images
• Calls to action 

At Reflect, we like to include behavioural psychology when creating ad variants to demonstrate the immense power of truly understanding your audience.

#4 Monitoring and Optimising

Never underestimate the power of consistent monitoring. It might seem obvious but by regularly checking key metrics such as click-through rate, conversion rate, and cost per acquisition, you can identify areas for improvement and make adjustments to your campaign as needed. 

For example: 

• You might notice a low click-through rate: to combat this, you could try testing different ad copy or images to see if this affects your results.
• You might notice a low conversion rate: to combat this, you should try testing your website’s landing page for potential optimisations - heatmapping is a great tool for this.  

By continuously monitoring your Fintech campaigns, you will be able to make optimisations that will inform future campaigns; helping to get more from your paid budgets both now and in the future. 

#5 Remarketing

Ultimately, the best way to get the most out of any paid media budget is to have an extremely well-crafted remarketing campaign. Remarketing allows you to target those who may have interacted with your brand or ads at some point early in the funnel and who are now further down in the research or conversion stages of the journey. 

Well-segmented remarketing campaigns enable you to target users based on if they’ve visited certain pages on your site or specific behaviours they have exhibited, allowing us to deliver highly personalised adverts to reel them back in. These users are much more likely to convert and can significantly improve the performance of your FinTech campaigns and, ultimately, your budget. 

We ran a similar campaign for a B2B FinTech client of ours which leveraged remarketing as part of a switcher campaign: targeting businesses who had visited the finance brands website before then researching competitors. We used an understanding of the users needs (based on the service pages they had visited) combined with Google Performance Max to display ads to the user that highlighted our client’s USPs compared to each specific competitor and draw them back into the conversion journey. This resulted in a 260% increase conversions, a 400% increase in conversion rate and a 79% reduction in CPA. Some impressive results if we do say so ourselves, but an excellent example of the power of remarketing. 

KEY TAKEAWAYS

To summarise, here are my top tips for making the most out of your FinTech brand’s paid media budget: 

• Spend time getting to know your audience beyond basic persona research. 
• Optimising for high-quality scores is a great way to get your ads ranking over that of your competitors. 
• A test-and-learn approach is the best way to optimise your budgets and make learnings that can be carried through to other areas of marketing. 
• It might seem obvious but monitor your campaigns daily and weekly to ensure they’re performing as you would expect, and don’t be scared to make changes. 
• Remarketing is a great way to target users further down the funnel and can garner significant results when executed as part of a wide paid media strategy. 

If you’re a FinTech brand looking to get more from your paid budget, please get in touch. We would be more than happy to help!